


What the Future Holds

by silenth



Series: Time is what you make of it [2]
Category: Twilight (Movies), Twilight Series - All Media Types, Twilight Series - Stephenie Meyer
Genre: Childhood Memories, Origin Story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-04
Updated: 2021-01-03
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:55:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26811010
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silenth/pseuds/silenth
Summary: Jasper gets two glimpses of his future and learns the power of predictions and patience. If he waits long enough, she always sees him coming.
Relationships: Alice Cullen/Jasper Hale
Series: Time is what you make of it [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1953487
Comments: 4
Kudos: 27





	1. Chapter 1

When he was 9, Jasper's mother got pregnant with his younger sister, Clara. It was a difficult pregnancy and after she was confined to her bed, he and his brother spent long unsupervised hours playing on the family's land. This included riding horses bareback, wading in the creek that ran across the edge of their property, and lots of pretend sword fights with branches. Between getting thrown from the horses, nearly drowning in the river, and Jasper almost losing an eye to his brother Sam (the first of his scars, a long crooked one above his eyebrow that disappeared when he was turned), his mother often said it would be a miracle if they both survived till the babe came. 

That was also how they met the fortune teller, the day Jasper got the first inkling that his future would be something unexpected. 

It was a day so hot they couldn't do anything but lie in the shallowest part of the creek where the water trickled over the rocks. Their pa would take the belt to them if they went too deep because they couldn't swim that well, but it had been so long since the last rain that the deepest part of the creek didn't even reach Jasper's thigh. Jasper stretched his arms out, closing his eyes and seeing the sun burn red on the back of his eyelids. It was a feeling he never quite forgot - how good the sun used to feel on his skin, back when it could warm him all the way through.

"Want to pan for gold again?" Sam asked. He swore to Jasper that he had found a real gold nugget in the creek once, that he had dropped it in the field running back to the house, but Jasper already possessed a suspicious nature and never quite believed him. 

"Naw, it's too hot." Jasper felt his stomach rumble and wondered what Ida Bell, their hired girl, would make for lunch. Her expertise was limited to cornbread and jerky or beans on toast and he was so sick of both of them he could vomit. "Sammy, could we catch a fish downriver, do you think?" he asked, and then a shadow moved over his head. 

"Seems I caught me two fish right here," a voice said and Jasper's eyes flew open. A haggard, dirty woman stared down at him, pretty much the definition of what his nine-year old mine would have called a witch. Not that he believed in witches. 

He wasn't sure how to sit up and keep his eyes on her at the same time so he stayed where he was. He heard Sam splashing in the water and then his voice - "Who're you and where did you come from? This is Whitlock land."

"That so? You don't begrudge an old woman a chance to cool off in your creek on her way, do you? Only passin' through." 

She continued to stare down at Jasper as she spoke to Sam. All the wrinkles on her face were lined with dirt and dust and she wore a tattered man's straw hat on her head, but her eyes (one green and one brown, he noted with fascination) glinted with humor. 

Sam allowed as to how he supposed that would be all right and she nodded. "Who might I thank for the privilege then?"

"Jasper Whitlock," Jasper said finally, sitting up as quick as he could and pushing his long dirty blonde hair out of his face. "That's my brother Sam."

The woman swept into a surprisingly elegant bow, sweeping her hat elaborately before plopping it back on her head. "Josiane Hebert. I don't suppose you two would be willing to do an old lady another favor and share what grub you might have to spare?"

The brothers exchanged a look but Josiane continued, "It would be a right Christian thing to do and I'm sure you two are of the Christian persuasion, ain't you?"

"Pa says we can't feed nobody not willing to work for it," Jasper said finally. 

"Yep, that's his rule," Sam nodded. 

"What kind of work would you have ole Josiane do then?" She sat down heavily on the edge of the creek, bending to splash some water on her sunburned face. "I could spin a tale for you if you fancy."

"What kind of tale?" Sam asked suspiciously. "We ain't gon' feed you for a fairy story, you know."

"Why don't you go scrounge up this feed and I'll see what I can think of." She flashed them a smile, showing a mouthful of cracked brown and yellow teeth. Jasper looked at his brother, who gave him a one-shouldered shrug, and then they ran off through the fields back to the house.

"What's for lunch, Ida Bell?" Jasper called as they thumped up the porch and slammed into the kitchen. 

"I told you a hunnert times not to slam into this house. It wears my nerves out!" Ida Bell was a skinny little thing with a nimbus of blonde hair that frizzed around her head and made her look like a stalk of wheat swaying in the wind. 

"Sorry, sorry, what's for lunch?"

"Not beans and toast again, I hope," Sam muttered.

Ida Bell scowled at him. "You should be so lucky as to get whatever I feed you, Samuel Whitlock. If you were my boy I would tan your hide from here to Sunday. And no, today we're having cornbread and jerky. It's on the table." She jerked her head toward the two battered plates sitting on the family's big wooden table.

"Ida Bell, can we take them down to the creek and eat there?"

"Of _course_ you can _not_ , Samuel Whitlock, you sit down at that table and eat. I ain't havin' you traipsing all over this land chewin' your jerky like a cow chewin' cud. 'S not proper."

Sam rolled his eyes and looked at Jasper. Sam, all of eleven years old, was taller and stronger, but Jasper had his mother's fair looks and what his daddy called her silver tongue. He could talk a chicken into laying its neck on the stump, his daddy always said. 

Jasper smoothed his hair back and moved toward her. "Ida Bell, it's so pretty outside today. I sure would love to eat this delicious lunch in the wondrous outdoors that the Lord created for us to enjoy. Plus it's hotter 'n Africa indoors and out. Couldn't we cool off by the creek? We'll be back in less'n thirty minutes and then I'll go read Mama some of the Bible this afternoon."

"Well," Ida Bell put her hands on her hips. "I suppose, but jest to the creek and back. And don't take those plates out there and lose them."

"We won't," Jasper grinned at his brother as they scooped the cornbread and jerky into the hems of their faded shirts.

When they reached the creek, Josiane was sitting just where she left them, smoking a stubby hand-rolled cigarette. They had never seen a woman smoke before and Jasper was fairly certain that was a sin. 

"That's a sin, that is," Sam spoke up, pointing to the cigarette and Jasper nodded, pleased to have his belief confirmed.

"That a fact? Don't your daddy smoke? Or your grandpa?"

"Yes, but a woman ain't supposed to."

Josiane laughed, low like smoke. "Funny how God assigns sins based on what parts we come out with. Of course, we women always pay with pain in the end regardless."

Jasper tilted his head and stared at her. "Here - you can have my jerky." He held out a hunk of it and her fingers brushed his when she reached out to take it. 

"And my cornbread, I suppose." Sam passed her his offering. "Now what kind of story are we going to get?"

She carefully stubbed out the cigarette on a rock and put the remainder of it back in the pocket of her dirty button-down shirt. "Thought on it, and the best story I could offer would be the story of Sam and Jasper Whitlock."

Sam smirked. "And what would that be?"

"Fortune tellin'," Josiane said, speaking around a lump of cornbread in her mouth. She pulled a canteen from her belt and took a slug of something that didn't smell a bit like water. "Palm readin'. I was trained in New Orleans by a genuine Voo Doo witch and I read palms for kings, queens, robbers, Injuns, all sorts of folks. Figure I can read palms for you two now."

"That's a sin too," Sam said flatly. "That's the darkest witchcraft."

"Is it?" Josiane looked surprised. "God wrote you a whole story there on that dirty hand and it's sinful for me to tell you what he said?"

Sam and Jasper both looked down at their browned and blistered hands. "God wrote them?" Jasper questioned. 

"Who else? The author of all." Josiane pointed at the sky, swallowing the cornbread with another slug from the canteen. "I don't hold with the devil, never have."

The brothers exchanged a wary look. "If you did hold with the devil, you'd like to tell us you didn't to fool us, wouldn't you?" Jasper hedged.

"Suspect I might," Josiane allowed. "But would I be able to wear this?" From under her shirt, she brought out a tarnished silver cross on a rope chain. She cradled it in her palm and looked at them with raised eyebrows. "If I held with the devil, it would burn me, ain't that true?"

Sam decided to throw caution to the wind. "All right then, read the story God wrote for me." He marched to her with his hand outstretched and Josiane peered down at for a few seconds, then spun a colorful tale of heroism on the fields of battle, falling in love with a beautiful blue-eyed girl (Sam was just old enough to find that idea interesting as opposed to disgusting), and becoming a successful Texas Ranger, traveling around and catching criminals and ne'er-do-wells. 

"Huh." Sam looked down at his hand again when she finished. "That's all right then, ain't it, Jasper?" 

Jasper was practically jumping up and down with eagerness, sure that his future had to be at least as exciting as Sam's, if not more so. "Yeah, that's real nice, Sam. Do me now," he rushed to Josiane's side, pushing his palm into her face. He smelled her breath, the tangy aroma of whatever spirit she'd been drinking almost covering up the rot of her teeth. 

She glanced up at him with a smile, then looked down at his hand and went still. She stared at it for a long time, long enough that Jasper started to sweat. He looked at his brother, who shrugged. "Josiane? What--" He looked down at his palm, seeing the familiar lines and calluses that looked the same to him as his brother's. They were both bigger than other kids their ages but surely that wouldn't change their futures none. It hadn't changed Sam's anyway. 

Josiane looked back up at him, her eyes wide with fear. Jasper's stomach clenched and he worried, for the first time, what he was capable of doing. He considered himself as good as most people he knew, if not a little better than some. He could talk people into things easy enough but he knew better than to use it to hurt them. He did his chores, he even won an award for reciting the most Bible verses of anyone in his Sunday School (two more than the pastor's daughter!). What could Josiane see that made her so afraid of him?

"Some things are already written and cain't be undone," she told him quietly. "It don't make sense at the time and we wonder why God chose it. But it don't do to question him too much. He got a plan no one can fault if they could see it from his eye view. That right, ain't it, Jasper?"

"Yes'm, I suspect it is." His mind whirled as he tried to make sense of what she was saying. 

"It gon' be a different road for you, son." She let go of his hand, gone cold and clammy in her tight grip. "The one comfort I can give you is this. You mindin'?" 

He nodded, his eyes staring so deep into hers he would always be able to draw those eyes, one green and one brown, from memory. "Love is real, and in the end, it's the only thing that matters. You won't know her 'til she finds you. Never let her go."

He crinkled his face up. "What does that mean?" he asked suspiciously, but Josiane abruptly rose up and began splashing away down the creek. She turned back at the bend, chewing on the jerky they'd given her much like the cow chewing cud that Ida Bell had feared they would be. 

"Don't forget it, son. God put you on a different path."

She nodded at him again, fear still alive in her eyes, and then she was gone. They never saw her again.

After a moment or two, Sam laughed and nudged Jasper's side with his elbow. "She had you goin', didn't she, brother? That crazy old lady makin' up all those stories! She gipped us good out of our lunch. Oh well, let's go back to the house before Ida Bell gets all het up." Sam grabbed his brother's arm and pulled him back toward their home, but part of Jasper stayed inside those words. He puzzled over them in his quiet moments and wondered what this path was, his "different path."

It felt like forever, but in truth it was just the blink of an eye until he understood exactly what the fear in Josiane's eyes had been for.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jasper's mother sends him a vision that helps determine his future.

Mail was slow and sporadic during the war. When Jasper did receive it, there was often a stack of letters from his mother and his sister waiting. His mother hadn't gone very far in school but she was a better correspondent than he would have guessed. She sent him all the news from home in her labored block lettering and, at the end of every letter, she reassured him again that he would come back to her safe once the fighting days were done. 

But that particular day, he only received one thin envelope. The handwriting on it was his father's slanting cursive and he immediately felt his stomach sink. He waited until he was alone to open it, finding a quiet shady spot under a tree. 

The envelope held a single sheet of paper covered front and back with cramped writing - the man was so cheap he hated wasting paper - and he knew immediately that even if he did return home safe, his mother wouldn't be there to greet him. 

_Jas -  
It is my sad duty to inform you that your mother went to her reward early this morning. She had taken ill with a lingering fever in March, as did many in these parts. It settled in her heart and afflicted her with breathlessness and palsy. We held out hope and prayed on her recovery, but the sickness lingered in her. After a fortnight, she was confined to her bed, from which she did not rise again. The doctor saw her twice, providing powders and tinctures to strengthen her, but the third time he came, he said there was naught to be done and went away. The fever has taken many in town of late and his capacity is stretched taut in caring for all of them.  
Sure she has gone to a better rest than she would ever know in this world but her glory is a cold comfort to us. In the weakened state of her final days, your mother was plagued by strange lucid fever dreams. It was a terrible sight, her eyes bright and wild with this madness, and your sister was so disturbed by your mother's moods I feared for her health as well.  
They both became insistent that I transcribe your mother's rantings in her precise words and send them to you and Sam. Your mother was not one for fancies such as these and I confess I do not hold they have any meaning. Yet as it was her dying wish, I have set them down here. Her words for you were: _

_"Tell Jasper it will be the smallest one, the one with night hair and sky eyes. She sees everything coming from a long way off. The little sky eyed girl so far away but not that far from here. Nothing's so far for him. He'll know her when he sees her. She lights him up. The little night girl."_

_I pray our Savior is with you in your time of need, and gives you peace. Clara and I think of you and Sam often. We hope to see you when these days are gone and peace rests on the earth once more. Until then, I remain, Your Devoted Father._

Jasper was holding the letter far from himself in shaking hands, as though he could distance himself from the news it contained. He folded it up and stuffed it in his jacket. He sat under the tree for a long time in stillness, remembering all the mornings he had woken up to the sound of her voice saying his name. Her arms around him the day he left home, how he had stood on the lowest step and hugged her so she would be taller than him again. 

He touched his face and found it wet with tears. When he was called away to his duties, he stood and removed the letter from his pocket, letting a strong breeze carry it aloft and whisk it away. 

There - gone like his only mother and no matter how he searched, he would never find it.

Seventeen days later, he met Maria and Nettie and Lucy. 

No homecoming, no family, no end to the days of war. Nothing his mother hoped for him would come to pass, except perhaps what she had seen before her soul guttered out like a candle.

For when his burning ended and Maria came to him with her promises and her praise for his talents, he remembered his mother's words. Maria was small and dark, as his mother had said, and she was a natural-born general. They planned together, the lands they would reclaim, the covens they could destroy. His mother had said she would be a little night girl, and surely they were few darker than Maria in looks and deeds, and he had rarely seen one smaller. So he went to bed with Maria, not only for that reason, but with that action, it seemed to confirm that she was the one his mother had told him was coming. His mother had said he would know her when he saw her, and he had.

Hadn't he?

In the years to come, Jasper began to wonder. He remembered Josiane's words, long ago when he was very small. Remembering his human life got easier as the years went on, like remembering an old fable he had heard countless times around the fire. It felt sometimes like it hadn't quite happened to him but he knew it like the back of his hand. He recalled Josiane had said, "You won't know her 'til she finds you." And something about love, that love was real, that it was important. 

He had never loved Maria, not for a second. He had liked her once, but when the novelty of her drive and her _rewards_ (that endless delicious flow of blood, always keeping him oversated so he would never stop fighting) wore off, he tired of her. And he knew better than anyone how weary she was of him, the dull and useless sadness that sanded down his vehemence a little more with every kill. 

Sometimes, especially in those darker moods after a battle, he wondered if he had missed the night girl somehow. If she was not Maria, if she had come to find him, he would more than likely have killed her. It seemed like he killed everyone he met, and plenty of them had been small and dark. 

_Wouldn't that be my luck?_ he thought after a battle where he killed another dozen, one of them a woman with long flowing jet-black curls. _I meet the woman I could love and I tear her apart._ He stood under a tree, watching a field of Texas wildflowers blowing in the breeze, and reattached his arm to his shoulder with venom. The curly-haired woman had been brutal, even standing a head smaller than him. He felt a sharp pang recalling the instant of disbelief she had felt when he had shredded her spine and crushed her skull, and handed her over to the flames. He had no choice if he meant to survive, he reminded himself again, but sometimes it was only his fear of what waited for him after this life that made him land the killing blows.

He had seen love among his army enough to believe that it was real. It never amounted to much - his newborn pairs never lasted more than a year. Even if one was useful enough to warrant keeping, once their mate was dead, the other simply gave up and bared their throat to their enemies.

More and more, Jasper had begun it was error in the way he was made, that he simply wasn't capable of feeling love. Perhaps he was too scarred, too gifted. Or he was so old he had gone off, his heart (or whatever it was that governed love) rotted through like human remains in the Texas heat.

And then, after so long a wait, he walked into a diner in Philadelphia, and a very small, black-haired girl with funny eyes came forward to meet him. She had seen him coming after all.

Years later, Jasper waited for Alice next to an old abandoned house. Wisteria vines had claimed the walls for their own years ago, and Alice had scaled them for clippings to bring home for Esme and Carlisle's anniversary. She had thrown down enough heavy purple blossoms to overflow his arms, and he still watched her with indulgent eyes. 

When she finally scampered down, her feet barely making contact with the bricks as she ran down to the ground, she barrelled toward him. He dodged her twice, not dropping a single petal, and then she wrapped herself around him, burying her face in his back. It was a playful fight, the kind he had almost forgotten existed until he found Alice and the Cullens. He had never imagined he would feel this kind of peace again. 

"What a beautiful bull you make," came her muffled voice, lips against his skin. "Your neck is lit up brighter than the sun, Jasper." 

The thick scars on his neck did not reflect sunlight so prismatically as the rest of him - it was more of an intensely glowing circle. Alice teased sometimes that his halo had slipped too far down, but then she always had the strange idea he was some kind of angel.

"You would be quite a matador, in your traje de luces."

"Those costumes are so divinely dramatic," Alice sighed. "The poor bulls of course, but remember the one we saw when we were in Spain?" They began the hike home, Alice running off occasionally if she saw another beautiful blossom to bring home or smelled an interesting scent. Every time she returned, she darted close and kissed him and he grinned.

They were more circumspect around strangers since strangers were, by and large, humans. They restrained themselves to small fleeting things - his hand on her back, her gaze grasping him close from across the room. Alone, they scaled each other like Alice had that wall, wrestled and teased and sprawled. Laughed- she could make him laugh until he was breathless and gasping. 

They were laughing at each other when Jasper looked down at her, her dark eyes reflecting the sky perfectly, blue on black. Sky eyes. "She was right about you," he said without thinking. 

"Rosalie? I could absolutely make matador outfits a trend, I don't care what she says." 

"No, my mother. You're my night girl. She predicted you would find me, you know."

She stopped and looked up at him. "She did? How? Tell me!"

"Have I never told you before?" he smiled, continuing on, his arms full of her flowers, and then she knocked him down and they rolled until they were covered in petals. He found himself on top of her, but her arms tight around him, both of them smelling quite strongly of wisteria. 

"Your mother was like me?" Her face was gleeful. "You never told me that!"

"No one's like you, darlin'. No, hers was a fever dream, shortly before she died. My father wrote it to me in a letter." He recounted it for her, the strange words imprinted in his mind perfectly, as though he had stood under that tree in Texas yesterday, rather than over a century ago.

"That's beautiful, Jasper," Alice whispered when he finished and he tucked another bit of purple flowers behind her ear. 

"I thought it was Maria at first," he admitted and Alice grimaced, "and then I thought perhaps I had missed her somewhere along the way and _then_ I thought maybe I couldn't love at all. But it was you all along, my little night girl with sky eyes." He lifted his hand to brush it over her hair - even in these sunny woods, her tufts of hair were black as a moonless sky. 

She smiled her assent and kissed him. She held up her tiny arm in turn and they fit their hands together, small pixie fingers slotting between his long, scarred ones, each one having been ripped off and patched with venom countless times. 

"You should never ever doubt love," Alice admonished him with a tug of his hand, not willing to let that tidbit pass her by. "Truly, Jasper, you can love harder and stronger than anyone I've found!"

"Well, for one who lived the way I did, love was rather incidental, Alice. I never thought I could be as good at it as I was at soldiering."

"Nonsense," she huffed, pushing him over to his back and beginning to pile the unbroken blossoms into his arms again. "Love would only have made you a better warrior. It's a cliche but it's true - love is the only true thing worth fighting for. At the end, it's all that matters."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was supposed to be a one-shot, but I realized the ending of the first part really wasn't right at all. So rather than re-writing I just did a chapter two. Of course, if you know me, you know it's HAE fluff at the end.
> 
> Alice's powers are why his mother referred to her as having sky eyes - she can see that are going to happen, similar to someone looking down from a great distance and watching things unfold. "Nothing's so far for him." - Really, the amount of time it took for them to find each other is pretty insignificant to a vampire. Jasper took the message more literally and expected to find her right off. Maria was small (not as small as Alice) and dark-haired and I liked the idea of Jasper mistaking her for the one he was waiting for. Alice doesn't care for that notion a bit, as you'd expect. Jasper's mom didn't have COVID but I figured I would use that as inspiration, just a reminder than there have always been (and will always be) epidemics and the world will somehow continue on.


End file.
